THE nation’s unemployment rate could rise more than 10 percent when the government announces its monthly numbers later this week. But before you have a stroke, please read on.

The jobless rate that will be prominently released Thursday – one day earlier than usual because of the July 4 holiday – is a sterilized version of what’s really going on in the economy.

Last month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for instance, said the unemployment rate rose to 5.5 percent from 5 percent the month before.

That was shocking enough. But the alternate way the BLS calculates joblessness is truly stroke-worthy.

According to the government, the unemployment rate rose to 9.7 percent last month, compared with 9.2 percent in April, if you include people who are so discouraged about finding work that they’ve stopped looking, as well as those who say they are only working part time because they can’t find full-time employment.

One year ago, that version of the unemployment rate – called U-6 for anyone who’d like to check my facts – was just 7.9 percent.

Yes, the unemployment rate under brutal true-to-life circumstances has gone from 7.9 percent to 9.7 percent in just 12 months.

Experts have been puzzled for most of this year by the fact that Americans are more pessimistic than they have been in decades even though the unemployment rate seemed to be holding steady at reasonable levels.

That puzzle is now solved. Unemployment levels aren’t steady; they are soaring.

But there’s more.

Back in 1994, the Clinton administration thought it would be nifty (not to mention politically convenient) if only some discouraged workers were counted in the U-6.

So the BLS surveyors started asking tougher questions and some 400,000 people who had given up looking for work suddenly disappeared altogether from the U-6 statistics.

As far as the government was concerned, they suddenly didn’t exist.

How high would the broader U-6 unemployment rate already be without this Clinton revision?

The BLS says that it’s anyone’s guess. But the figure could easily be over 10 percent. And one person who follows this subject very closely thinks the U-6 jobless rate might be as high as 14 percent using the old surveying techniques.

Why don’t you ever read about the higher U-6 unemployment rate? Probably because the government puts the other lower jobless rate – which is expected to improve to 5.4 percent this month – in the top paragraph of its monthly press release, and the media usually doesn’t look past that.

Wall Street thinks there will also be a loss of another 50,000 or so jobs for the month. So far, jobs have disappeared in every month of 2008.

It might seem illogical for the unemployment rate to get better when jobs are still being lost. But that can happen because the pool of job applicants is falling faster than the number of available jobs, perhaps because people have given up looking for work.

For what it’s worth, I think the decline in jobs probably won’t be as bad as 50,000. But that’s only because the government – despite the horrible condition of the economy – is scheduled to add around 155,000 jobs that it thinks, but can’t prove, are being created by newly formed businesses.

These 155,000 extra jobs come from something called the birth/death model, which has been skewing government employment data for years and making Wall Street predictions horribly wrong. (Let’s see if it happens again.)

Thursday’s number could be dangerous for the stock market no matter whether it’s above or below expectations.

Here’s why.

Way back on Nov. 27, I told readers that the stock market was about to have major problems. If you took my advice and got out of stock then, you’d be about 20 percent richer today.

And I mentioned after that column that the economy would look a little better in the spring, mainly because of positive aberrations caused by seasonal adjustments that the government makes to its economic data.

Those strong seasonal adjustments – plus the birth/death tweak I mentioned above – are still affecting the employment numbers. So the numbers could make people feel a little better.

But if the economy doesn’t lose as many jobs as Wall Street expects, there will be increased fear that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates sooner rather than later.

That could kick the stock market when it’s already down.

And if the employment figures come in weaker than expected, Wall Street will be concerned that the Fed won’t be able to stimulate the economy without causing heightened inflation fears and further damage to the US dollar.

And that could kick the stock market when it’s already down.

In other words, Thursday is a lose-lose situation.

My advice to readers: Stocks are more dangerous than they were in November. Find someplace else to invest your money.